A computer programme taught to generate clickbait news headlines claims 2013 was the year of the self-driving car and that One Direction have been killed in a fire. The programme, which replicates the luring links of sites such as Buzzfeed, is the result of feeding a neural network with two million sensational headlines. Created by Norwegian developer and blogger Lars Eidnes, the clickbait generator creates headlines which play on readers’ curiosity and dumps them onto a website designed to look like BuzzFeed, called Click-o-Tron. In a bid to “free up clickbait writers to do useful work”, Eidnes used an artificial neural network to create a prediction machine. Bad news for the National Dog Food Movement…Screenshot By teaching the programme to predict what word should come next in a sequence like…